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I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the path of my life. Most of you are aware that I’m a college student in my 40’s, and that I have opinions about almost everything. What you may not realize is that I’m quite interested in your opinions as well. There’s a pool of knowledge here that I enjoy, and I’m after plumbing the depths of it for my own benefit. I admit freely that my hope is for this topic to help me make some decisions about my remaining working years, post-graduation (my aim is advocacy of some sort). With that in mind:

What is the role of America, as a world leader, in the lives of individuals in developing nations? How much responsibility do American individuals have versus the American government? What do we, as a country, owe the individual people of the rest of the world? Do we, in fact, owe them anything? Where does our individual consumer responsibility end? Am I obligated to lower my standard of living to direct those resources to people who were not fortunate enough to be born here? My lifestyle is far from extravagant, but still above that of a typical third-world resident – what should that mean to me?

I have several other topic ideas related to this that I’d like to discuss specifically with WWGHA members; this seems a good place to begin. Thoughts?

***I'm not sure that this is the best place for this topic, as I actually want to talk about social good apart from religion - mods, please relocate if this is not an acceptable place for this thread.